Throughout my 15-year journey as a SQL Server DBA, I’ve encountered numerous technologies promising revolutionary performance improvements, but few have delivered as convincingly as memory-optimized tables.
First appearing in SQL Server 2014 as part of the in-memory OLTP feature (codenamed „Hekaton„), this technology has matured significantly in subsequent releases. The fundamental concept is elegantly simple: while traditional tables live on disk and must be loaded into memory for processing, memory-optimized tables permanently reside in memory with disk storage serving only as a persistence mechanism.